QuickBooks Available Inventory

If you use the Inventory feature of QuickBooks you understand the concept of quantity on hand – a measure of the quantity of any inventory part or inventory assembly item that you have at any given time. QuickBooks also has another measure of quantity that many people don’t understand – available quantity. Let’s dig in to this feature to see how it works.

Quantity on hand is the quantity of a particular item you have in your possession at a given point of time. If you receive an item, this goes up. If you sell an item or use that item in an assembly build, it goes down. You can adjust it with the Adjust Quantity/Value On Hand function. Keep in mind that this value is “date sensitive” – any time you see a report or transaction that involves a date then the quantity on hand shown is the value calculated as of that date.

If you are selling inventory parts (or assemblies) this value can be misleading. It doesn’t take into account other “promises” or allocations that you have made for this item. You may, for example, have a sales order that is promising a quantity of this item to a customer, or a pending build assembly transaction that should consume the item. So if I’m talking to a customer and entering an invoice or sales order it is easy for me to overcommit, to sell items that I don’t really have available because of other commitments that I’ve made. That is a problem.

Higher level accounting/inventory systems often have a concept of “available to promise” – a quantity that represents not only the quantity you have on hand but also involves allocations (promises) made to sales orders in progress or future builds of assemblies, as well as incoming purchase orders. This is a very useful tool.

In QuickBooks we have an optional feature that is called the quantity available, which is similar to the “available to promise” concept.

QuickBooks Preferences

There are several Items & Inventory preferences that affect how this works.

To enable this feature you should check the two boxes under “When calculating Quantity Available…”.

The next choice is optional. If you check the “Warn if not enough inventory to sell” box then any time that you enter a quantity in a sales transaction for an amount that exceeds the chosen value, you will get a popup warning. I generally recommend having the box checked, because you don’t really want to be selling things that you don’t have (and having “negative inventory” is generally a very bad thing to do in QuickBooks). If you check this box then you have an additional option over which value to work with. I recommend selecting “Quantity Available” in most cases.

Note that this feature has no effect on inventory valuation or your financial statements. All this is doing is adding warnings in the sales transactions and providing you with additional information in some windows and reports. You can easily turn this on or off as you wish with no bad side effects.

Current Availability Window

When this feature is enabled QuickBooks will provide you with a window that lets you see details about the available quantity. This can be reached from several locations:

In the item list, select the item, then either click the Activities button at the bottom of the list or right click on the item to get a menu, and select Current Availability.

In a purchase order, invoice, sales order, sales receipt or estimate, select an item for the order. If the item is an inventory part or inventory assembly then you will see a small graph symbol in the quantity column. Clicking on this will open the window.

The Current Availability window shows you a summary of the information about this item and the status of the quantity that is available. The item that is shown here is an inventory part that has been used in sales orders and purchase orders, as well as being a component in an inventory assembly.

As you can see, we have 8 of this item “on hand”, but 12 of them are allocated to other transactions that are in process. A net “quantity available” of –4 says that you shouldn’t be telling your customer that you can sell them the item, even though there may be 8 on hand. Or at least you should be saying that delivery might be delayed.

However, you can also see that there are 6 of these coming in on purchase orders. Maybe we CAN promise the product to the customer? If you click the Show Details button at the bottom of the screen and select purchase orders from the dropdown list, you can see a list of the open purchase orders for this item.

This shows you when the items will be received, which gives you some idea of when you might be able to fulfill the order. You can double click on the individual orders in this list to look at the purchase order details.

Quantity Available in Reports

One of my favorite inventory management reports in QuickBooks is the Inventory Stock Status by Item report. If you enable the available inventory feature there are three columns added to the report; “On Sales Order”, “For Assemblies” and “Available”.

Let’s look at the “Lens” item that we investigated earlier. You see that there are 8 “on hand”. There are 10 “on sales order”, which represents the quantity of this item that you’ve already promised to someone on open sales orders. There are two of this item promised (allocated) to pending builds of an inventory assembly item that uses this item as shown in the “for assemblies” column. That works out to be an “available” amount of –4. The total quantity on purchase orders is shown in the “on PO” column along with the “next delivery” date (based on the expected due date of the purchase order).

A word of caution, however. Keep in mind that most reports in QuickBooks have a date range associated with them. Most information windows or lists do not have a date associated. If I open the inventory stock status by item report it usually defaults to the current date, and in this case you’ll notice that the report differs from what I see in the current availability window (which was set to “all” dates).

Several of my sales orders are dated in the future, and so they aren’t counted in the on sales order value in this particular report. This report implies that I actually have 5 available that I can promise to someone, along with 6 more coming on a PO. That is misleading! If you date sales orders in the future (such as for orders that you want to hold off until next week), you have to watch the date selection in this report.

A Useful Feature

This is not fool-proof. Date errors can create problems, as I’ve shown. QuickBooks is not doing any “time phasing”, so you can’t easily tell how far in the future these demands are (sales orders and pending builds), and you have limited visibility on the supply dates (purchase orders). Incoming items on a P.O. may already be committed to another project or customer. You also have to remember that this feature does not stop you from selling something you don’t have, you can still sell the items in spite of the warnings.

Even with all of that, I find that the quantity available feature is very useful, and I always recommend that this be enabled as shown here. This feature helps you avoid running your quantity on hand to a negative value, which is very important in QuickBooks as negative inventory can have bad effects on your COGS calculations and your financial reports. It gives you tools that help you be more accurate in providing sales delivery promises to your customers, so that you don’t make commitments to shipments that you cannot fulfil.

About the author

Charlie Russell

Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He's been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70's, and remembers releasing his first commercial accounting software product when you had a one-floppy disk drive system, loading the program from one floppy and then replacing that with the other floppy to hold the data. He has a special interest in inventory and manufacturing software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor with additional certifications for QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Enterprise. He also is a Xero Certified Partner. Visit his CCRSoftware web site for information about his QuickBooks add-on products. Charlie can be reached at [email protected]

45 Comments

The Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet is another tool that has great potential, but is lacking in features. I wish this report had more options/features, and the ability to export to excel in Summary, and detail.

The SO Fulfillment Worksheet is also useless for Advanced Inventory users with Site locations because there are no Site Options.

Agreed. This is a big issue and upon realizing it immediately got a refund because it effectively makes advanced inventory useless to us. We got advanced inventory to keep track of inventory in multiple sites, but it doesn’t do this very well for two main reasons:

a) as you mentioned, the SO worksheet is effectively useless with multiple sites because it pulls the on hand qty from a global level.
b) when creating an invoice from a sales order, it again shows you only the global on hand qty, not the qty on hand for that particular site.

Another issue with available inventory in QB:
* You enter ITEM A on 2 separate line items for 500 units each
* Meanwhile, you have only 600 units globally
* It will allow you to invoice for 1000 units total despite only having 600 units

Right, but when you are turning over a sales order to an invoice, you have two options: a) turn over all items, or b) turn over selected items. If you select option b, then it will automatically zero out the quantities for the items that are not available – depending on your setting (on-hand minus sales order, or just on-hand). You can manually override it though if you want.

However, with multiple sites, it continues to show you available qty based on a global level rather than for the site you selected. The only time it warns you when there isn’t enough to sell for that particular site is when you first enter it on a sales order. Unless, of course, you click for the availability of every single item on your sales order… which is very time consuming.

So when selecting option B with multiple sites, you don’t have an opportunity to see the stock levels of that particular site when invoicing. You only see global levels. Which means you either have to “remember” what was out of stock for that site or invoice everything then adjust it when you realize there is no stock.

Basically, I’m back at the drawing board trying to figure out this question – how can I manage multiple sites (eg. for holds and such) and have QB alert me when I don’t have enough stock to sell in that particular site. Do you know of any 3rd party solutions off-hand perhaps?

Alex, I don’t have a specific recommendation at this point – I’m evaluating other inventory systems but I’m not ready to get to that kind of detail. You can look at products from MISys, ACCTivate and Fishbowl (and there are others) that work with QuickBooks for the accounting side of thing, but manage inventory separately. These aren’t always cheap.

Thanks for the heads up Charlie.
We are discussing handling inventory right now in our development work, connecting ACT! (CRM) and QuickBooks. The problem of course is, if the front office sales people are taking orders without access to inventory information, no matter how smart QB is, the problem isn’t being addressed. It needs to be addressed at source i.e. those taking the orders. In fact, for some types of business, awareness of inventory needs to be occurring at the quoting stage, i.e. even before the customer commits with a sales order. Larger accounting products and ERP solutions offer that but smaller business, such as those running QB don’t have that luxury (or expense).
For our development work we are looking to expose live inventory data direct from QB actually in the CRM module live at time of quoting, to give that early warning to sales staff.

Charlie – great article – as usual. I know I’ve gotten comments from clients re: parts used in an assembly. Let’s say you sell Part A but Part A is also used in Assembly B. The customer places an order for Assembly B. The available quantity for Part A doesn’t take into account that Part A is going to be needed for that order. Do you suggest that folks do Pending Builds as soon as they get a sales order for an assembly? The advantage would be that the Quantity Available would be correct – but it seems like a lot of work. What do you think are best practices?

MB, that is a tough one within the QuickBooks framework. Higher level manufacturing products may take that into account (but not always).

In QuickBooks, if you want to place that allocation for the component, you are going to have to place the pending build. The danger here is that there is very little time phasing, and the reports are so date sensitive, that it is very easy to lock down inventory improperly.

If this is a big issue for a firm then they might be better off looking at a higher level manufacturing add-on to handle this. But, keep in mind that these higher level programs also require you to manage the data, and sometimes that also creates a lot more work!

Ah, but it does. Once you place a Sales Order for Assembly B which includes 10 of Part A, the Stock Status by Item report line for Part A will show an increase of 10 in the For Assemblies column, and a decrease of 10 in the amount Available column. The Stock Status by Item [using all dates] is the one to go to for most inventory questions.

I think the decepitive report is the Inventory Item Quick Report – it does NOT take into account items that are reserved For Assembly!

If you place an assembly item on a sales order, the “on sales order” value increases for the assembly. There is no effect on the component parts of the assembly. They don’t change on this report.

The “For Assemblies” column is affected by “pending builds” only. When you make a pending build, the components are then marked in the “for assemblies” column of the report. Note that the “pending build” won’t affect any column for the assembly, so you don’t have a view of what you might be building, which is too bad.

An item QuickReport isn’t deceptive – it serves its purpose. Use it to see what actually has been done. It isn’t intended to be a planning tool like the inventory stock status by item report.

If you need to live with QuickBooks, you need to live with negative inventory. But you don’t get a divide by zero error, you just get some odd numbers in COGS if you don’t fix the issue. Acutally, if you bring inventory back up to zero or higher then QuickBooks does a very nice job of making up for the odd calculations.

It is a tough situation. I used to own a software company that had an inventory package. When we didn’t allow people to sell more than what they have, we got major complaints. You can’t stop a sales transaction that has to go out the door! If you put a hard stop, then people can’t use features. Or they make bogus inventory adjustments to bring in items to sell, and it causes even more problems.

I have one question. When opening the item list, on the ‘Qty on hand’ column, is there any way to see the qty for one site only insted of the total. Right now it shows as total and I would have to check the availability and click on each site to see the different qty on hand for the sites.

The reason is, we have mulitiple sites and we want customer service to only look at what we have on hand of the local site and not go through details. Right now what they do is go to the item list and see the qty on hand, but it doesn’t give them the accurate number.

Please let me know if there is a way or if you recommend a way for users with limited access and/or knowledge to see the qty on hand without running reports or clicking into details.

Meraf: You won’t see the “site” totals in the item list itself, as there is no way to filter for a specific site. In addition, using the item list to determine what is on hand is risky, because the item list is not “date sensitive”. You could have some future dated transactions that would skew the values there (you shouldn’t, but people do that sometimes).

You can use the “Inventory Center” instead – you can add the quantity on hand to the display, and that has a filter for site. That would do exactly what you are trying to do with the item list. You still have an issue with date sensitivity.

You could use the “Inventory Stock Status by Site” report, whic has a site selection dropdown. This has the added advantage of being date sensitive, and you have other information such as the quantity reserved for assemblies, for sales orders, and the quantity on PO’s. That is a much more useful display.

Can someone tell me, in running a report, Inventory Stock Status by Site, selecting All Sites, there is a site called ‘No Site’ and it shows quantities ‘On Sale Order’ but when I double click on it and try to open it, there is no open sale order that is not assigned a site. What is ‘No Site’ stands for and how can I update the quantities in that site to show zero?

Meraf, I have not had my hands on a file that shows that issue. I suspect that you have some corruption in your file. I would suggest running the “rebuild” feature to see if that corrects the issue. If not, then you need to get someone to look at the file for you, in more depth.

The transaction for received item we can found it in vendor center as addition to inventory and for selling we use create invoice which is a deduction to inventory report how about for the transfer of item or any adjustment for the item made due to damage or some any cases. Please let me know what is the proper quickbooks version should i needed for the inventory that can i properly recorded for the incoming and outgoing of items.

We deal with a lot of pending builds.. is there a report I can run that will tell me which pending builds are OK to remove from pending after inventory is received? Pending build repts. just show which builds are pending and I have to go into them all to see if it can be removed from pending, which is time consuming.

also, If I invoice customers for items needed (having them pre-pay specific items) putting that item into a negative, receive payment from customer, create and send the purchase order to vendor, then I have to double receive that item to show accurate QOH. Is there a better way? Will my process create “pending builds” for assemblies I have already fulfilled?

Renee, I don’t see a report that is going to tell you what pending builds can be fulfilled. You can look at the Inventory Stock Status by Item report to see items with a quantity listed “for assemblies”, and see if they are marked to order, and if they aren’t then work back to the assembly, but that is going to be time consuming as well.

I’m not clear why you have to “double receive” items in the scenario you outline. And I recommend against forcing inventory negative, as it does very odd things to your COGS calculations as well as making it hard to reconcile the inventory reports with the financial reports.

As for the “double receiving”.. I order/store items for customers that is specific to their company. In order to do this, I would need to create an invoice to the customer for the items, when I receive payment I would then send out the purchase order to the vendor to make and ship these items to me. If my customers item is at 0 QOH and I invoice them for 100; the QOH goes to -100. When the item is delivered if I receive it once the QOH goes back to 0, but I actually have 100 on hand so I have to go and adjust my QOH to 100 if I want the inventory to be accurate. There has to be a better way and I am concerned that going into a negative QOH might affect builds that have already been fulfilled and shipped!?! Hope I little more clear on this. Thank you for your help!

Renee, it is hard to give specific advise through “blog comments”, as I don’t have a good picture of your entire business situation. I do recommend that you locate a good QuickBooks advisor (see the “find a consultant” box to the right of this page, for example) to go through this with you in detail.

I can’t see why you double receive, but it isn’t clear what you are doing as far as items purchased for customers. I assume you are delivering them to the customer. You invoice in advance (so inventory goes negative) then you purchase and receive them. You should have zero on hand by that point, and that seems correct as you are giving it to the customer when it comes in? If you double receive, you have twice as much on hand as you need.

However, going back a bit further, I would recommend considering a different approach. Don’t “invoice” until you actually have the items to deliver. Use a sales order if you wish to present the customer with a document that they will pay from – that won’t drive inventory negative. Or, if you must use an invoice, make it inactive until the items are received. The payment that you receive in advance would be handled in a different way – perhaps a credit memo (there are several ways that work, which to use depends on details).

I appreciate your feedback. When we receive the items; we hold on to them in our inventory to use on assembled products for the customer. We order a larger quantity to keep in our inventory to use for customers orders throughout the year, so we need to show accurate QOH. When that item hits the low limit; we contact the customer, email the invoice, collect payment, order item from vendor, and then receive item. It’s a pre-paid/non-owned item transaction for us.

I will talk with our accountant re: a few different ideas/options. I am completely against driving inventory in a neg. for fear of what it will do to builds and COGS.

Thanks for helping.. I love your blog! You provided awesome information/education; which is key is being proactive in business.

Hello,
I have an item that is part of multiple assemblies. When I look at the item’s “Current Availability” window I show a quantity on hand of zero, a quantity of zero on sales order’s. but I do show a quantity of 5 on quantity reserved for assemblies.

When I look at the details tab I show no sales orders using the item and also do not show any pending builds using the item. I have an open purchase order for 75.

My question is: What is creating the quantity of 5 “Quantity reserved for assemblies”? I cannot find any pending builds using this item and I cannot understand where the quantity of 5 is being generated from!

We mostly manufacture on a Make by order basis.. make the product specific to the Sales order. Therefore we have a lot of open sale orders in our system. The problem we are having with QB’s is organizing all the orders to get a quick glance on a day to day basic for when the orders will be filled based on items coming in from vendors, production scheduling for orders that are ready to fulfill, orders that can partially be filled, and orders that have issues and need attention before fulfilling.

Currently we export all open sales orders to excel, and manually enter in items that are pending assemblies, date those items are expected from vendors, when we expect to fulfill (production schedule), and other important information re: all open Sales orders. This excel spreadsheet gives everyone in the company an update on all order status. However, it is a very time consuming process and at any given time the status could change for a number of reasons but until the spread sheet is updated; only purchasing and/or production will know..

Is there a good Sales Order Management add-on software to QB’s to help streamline and compile all the data regarding our open sales orders so that all departments are able to know the status in live time?

It is hard for me to give you a specific recommendation without knowing a lot more about your process. If you just want to extract info from sales orders there are reporting tools that may help, although you would need to set things up (QQube comes to mind). When you start talking about production schedules, etc., then you are getting a lot more complicated and then you need to be considering the more expensive add-ons like MiSYS, but that is a really big step.

Dear Charles,
Thank you for your article. I was re-reading it to refresh my understanding of QB Inventory and try to answer a puzzling problem I encountered in QB 2012;
Q; It appears to me the “Inventory Stock Status Item report” IS date (time) sensitive to future dated invoices and that the “Physical Inventory Worksheet” (for the same item) IS NOT date (time) sensitive to future dated invoices?; I am I correct?,…and if so why is this? I expected they would show the same figire for the item on the same date. I ask because was taking a end of month physical count on 4/30 and have one invoice future dated to 5/1 because a customer needs it to pay me quicker; I assumed (incorretly) that both reports would show the SAME On-Hand quantity as of 4/30, but they are different by the item qty of the item on the 5/1 invoice. Is this proper, or a limitation of the basic QB inventory system? Thanks in advance for your thougths on the matter.
Regards,
Jim B.

Jim, as you may notice, the Physical Inventory Worksheet doesn’t have an option to select a “date range” or date in the top of the window. Therefore it just looks at the inventory list, similar to what you see in the “Inventory List” window. No date sensitivity. That’s the way it goes…

You could modify the inventory stock status by item report to remove columns and get a report that would work for a physical inventory, but that is date sensitive.

You want to build those assemblies – go ahead, create a build transaction for them. Then you have the assembly to sell.

All that is fine – it has nothing to do with estimates. And, that preference you are referring to only affects the “quantity available” number that shows up in places like the inventory stock status by item report – it doesn’t affect assembly builds.

What is it that you are trying to do that you can’t? You haven’t really asked a question…

As an example, we purchase pig fat and use it in certain Stock Assemblies.
We’ve received orders from customers that demand these products and Sales Orders have been created.
Now, when I go to create Build Assemblies QB tells me there is insufficient stock. And that is crazy. We still have over 50KG of pig fat.

(I’ve triple checked the Bill of Materials of Stock Assemblies)

This is a big problem and I’m not sure how to determine what we are doing wrong.

Up to this point I’ve been coping with Pending builds and making Stock Adjustments. But I fear that these adjustments will have ill affects on our accounting.

The Stock Assemblies are 100% in order, so, I may not be certain, but I feel the issue with unnecessarily depleting Stock Parts must lie within the Sales Orders or Invoicing.

In honesty, I’m not an accountant and QB befuddles me at the best of times. My role is simple; create sales orders and build assemblies, receive Invoices for stock and manage our inventory. I don’t really see the financial side of things. I’m more hands-on, as it were.

I know I’m a bit of a scatter-brain (as you found out) I hope I didn’t jumble this again.

Sorry…
Also, what’s up with Pending Builds just popping up on their merry own, weeks down the road? eg. I didn’t create all these Pending Builds (I dealt with a few), and yet they’re there (en mass and growing) in the report… month after month. oh my…

James, you probably should sit down with a QuickBooks consultant to go over some of your processes. It is difficult to give specific answers in comments in a blog post like this, without actually having hands on your file.

Let me throw out a couple of tidbits to consider:

QuickBooks inventory levels are date specific. If I build an assembly on a given date, the program looks at the Qty On Hand for components as of that date. So, if you build an assembly, then for some reason you make a change to a receipt transaction or some adjustment that changes the balance on hand of the item on that build date so that you no longer have enough items, QuickBooks will turn that build into a pending build for you. See this article for an explanation: http://www.sleeter.com/blog/2011/02/why-won%E2%80%99t-quickbooks-let-me-build-this-assembly/

Sales orders won’t affect any of this, because they don’t (themselves) deplete your quantity on hand.

If you aren’t sure what is going on with an item, you can check the balance. For example, the pig fat item. Right click on it in the item list and select the “QuickReport”. Set the date range to “All”. Then you see a running balance of the qty on hand, and you can see what transactions are affecting the balance.

One very common error – you receive a quantity of an item on a given date, and then you build an assembly that uses those items. Then, a few days later, you get the bill from the vendor and you enter that. If you change the date of this transaction to be the BILL date, from the earlier RECEIPT date, you have moved that receipt to the later date. That might change a build to “pending”, as the items are now marked as being received later than when you used them.

Regarding identifying stock quantities at different locations–I have solved this problem by creating an item, for instance, “Rice, 16 oz.” and then creating sub-items for each location with a letter of the alphabet representing the location–“Rice, 16 oz. A,” Rice 16 oz. B,” etc. I have created and memorized stock status reports for each location (time consuming the first time, then easy to maintain) so that I can reconcile the stock to each location. I can see the activity in each warehouse and the total for the item, all in one place. Training for employees entering sales orders was quite easy. This would work better for some types of situations than others. It works well for us.

Caren, that is a method that many people use. It has the advantage of being able to be used in QB without having to buy the Advanced Inventory system. It has the drawback of being very hard to manage properly without a lot of extra work (such as the setup that you talk about). As you say, works for some better than for others.

We are having issues with inventory such as the quantity on hand changes. For example, a physical inventory is taken monthly. The inventory is adjusted to reflected the counted balance. The balances are verified in QuickBooks, and the inventory valuation summary report is run. We have noticed changes to some balances a month or so after the balances were adjusted. For example, the July physical inventory was taken. Adjustments were made, all negative inventory was corrected. Upon review in September, negative balances and other changes occurred to the July valuation. Negative balances re-occurred. What can cause this issue? We perform build assemblies. If a build assembly was created in July, and was deleted in September, could that affect the July balance? Do pending builds affect your on hand balance? If pending building are deleted, could that cause your on hand balance to change?

Yes, if you build an assembly in July, then delete the transaction at a later date, that affects the July balance. Why are you “deleteing” a build? You are saying it didn’t happen, and there is a transaction date, so when you delete it the effects occur on that original transaction date.

hi , im new to quickbook, the company im working with has many point of sales , when they give points of sales inventory they record it as sales order , when a point of sale sell an item , the company record an invoice to point sale
so now they asked me to give them inventory for each pt of sale.

it is like i want to check for all pt of sales the sales orders and deduct what is invoiced to make the inventory
is there any easiest solution ? coz it will take toooooo much time to do this

no no , they r not using any other software , as i told you a point of sale X , need items , they send the items as a sales order only .
whenever this point of sale sell an item they record it as sales.

so they are using point of sale as a customer , when a pt of sale sell an item they will receive its payment.
NB: that point of sale is not all for the company , its like a stand in a mall , and its like i have inventory in that mall , when they sell we receive the amount.
so this is causing me a problem , because quickbook will give me the inventory all , but for the company the inventory in the company is deducted from all sales order , plus they need me to : for every customer (considered as pt of sale) remove all items invoiced from sales order .

OK, that is a bit clearer. When someone refers to “point of sale” usually they are referring to a “point of sale program” or register – like using QuickBooks Point of Sale.

You are providing different vendors, which may not be employees of your company, with inventory stock “on consignment”. That is, you don’t bill them for it when you give it to them, you only bill them for what they actually sell.

You don’t mention which QuickBooks product you are using.

One way to do this (there are several) is very similar to what you are doing. Create a sales order for each of these locations, when you give them something you add that quantity to the sales order. You can have just one sales order per location, if you wish, or multiple sales orders per location if you need to track that. If you have enabled the “available inventory” feature (using Premier or Enterprise) then you can see what you have committed and what you do not. You can run sales order reports by customer to see what each customer has. You can create invoices from those sales orders to create the billing for the customer, and to reduce what is on the sales order.

There are variations of this that depend on specific circumstances.

It is difficult to go into more detail than this in comments on a blog.